iTunes 4 and Rendezvous

Fill me in.. why's everyone so excited and so anxious to get AAC support in iTunes? I guess my confusion is partially due to my ignorance of the file type AAC.. but isn't that the compression used for DVD audio along with MPEG for picture? Why would anyone want that support in iTunes?

:confused:

Visualizations are already pretty smart, if they are coded to be... you can get a fair amount of information from iTunes via the API. It would be cool if you could get beat information, rather than having to detect it yourself, but other than that, I don't know what they could supply.

What I would like is sample code of a simple OpenGL visualization, so I don't have to learn Carbon programming just to make one of my own.

Originally posted by insidedanshead
Fill me in.. why's everyone so excited and so anxious to get AAC support in iTunes? I guess my confusion is partially due to my ignorance of the file type AAC.. but isn't that the compression used for DVD audio along with MPEG for picture? Why would anyone want that support in iTunes?

:confused:

It's simply more compression with the same quality. So theoretically, you can save space... hold more songs. More important if/when the iPod supports it so you can store more songs on it.

One suggestion to apple though - you should NOT allow people to convert their MP3's to MP4/AAC. It just shouldn't be an option. Cause you know people will do it... and it's just wrong.

arn

MP4/AAC has much nicer sound qulity than MP3s. MP3s have a habit of coming out a little dull while MP4s don't.

Of course this is assuming you rip it direct from the CD and aren't recompressing MP3s, in which case you'd just get MP3 quality made worse.

isn't it a fact, if one converts .cda (normal cd files) to .mp3, it removes data that is not audible to a normal person.

i mean with audible, data that the human ear rarely hears.

that is the reason why .mp3 files are a lot smaller (well compression helps too).

but if .mp3 files have already been "compressed" and data removed which is not necessary, which part would still be removed to make .aac files a lot smaller.

maybe it is the compression, right?

oh god. i wanted to say something else. but i forgot.

well, i ain't an expert, but i could not imagine that converting .mp3 to .mp4 (or .aac) would be a good idea. would the quality not suffer?

in as, converting .cda files to .aac would surely be a great idea.

i hope there would be a plug in device (one for the mac and another for the stereo (hope we do not have to buy a separate one)) to use this tech ASAP.

i would love that for christmas.

my ramblings... my ramblings...

1) Converting MP3 -> MP4 would be stupid.

2) removing the inaudible stuff is the compression.

Originally posted by arn
2) removing the inaudible stuff is the compression.

This is largely incorrect. While removing the "inaudible" stuff (some people hear better than others) does help, any patterned signal can be compressed. A lot of the quality loss in compression comes from picking a different signal, close to the original, that matches a compressible pattern and substituting it for the original signal. Thus, you get something close to the original, but can still massage it into something that can be described with much fewer bits. This often means "strange" parts of the original signal (something that isn't close to any of the compressible patterns) can sound very different in compressed form, and why some instruments and particular sounds are expressed very badly in MP3 format.

For example, to oversimplify a bit, if you had the signal 2,4,6,8,9,12,14,16,18,... you could replace it with 2n. You'd only be wrong once, and you've now got a representation that takes only 2 characters to express in ASCII instead of 22 :). That is, until the source comes along that is all odd digits. Anyway, you get the idea.

Has anyone else noticed that the price for engraving an iPod has dropped from $49 to $20.

Much more reasonable, if you ask me! I guess Apple is just trying to squeze every little bit of revenue out of the iPod as they can, leading up to the holliday buying season.

I cant wait for the new version of iTunes. Ill be able to put all my songs on my G4 and play them anywhere around my house on my clamshell iBook.

Sounds pretty good to me!

Originally posted by redAPPLE
isn't it a fact, if one converts .cda (normal cd files) to .mp3, it removes data that is not audible to a normal person.

i mean with audible, data that the human ear rarely hears.

that is the reason why .mp3 files are a lot smaller (well compression helps too).

but if .mp3 files have already been "compressed" and data removed which is not necessary, which part would still be removed to make .aac files a lot smaller.

maybe it is the compression, right?

oh god. i wanted to say something else. but i forgot.

well, i ain't an expert, but i could not imagine that converting .mp3 to .mp4 (or .aac) would be a good idea. would the quality not suffer?

in as, converting .cda files to .aac would surely be a great idea.

i hope there would be a plug in device (one for the mac and another for the stereo (hope we do not have to buy a separate one)) to use this tech ASAP.

i would love that for christmas.

my ramblings... my ramblings...

mp3 compression IS audible if you have decent equipment. definitely. 128kbps makes a fairly big impact. and converting mp3 to aac is stupid, yes.

Originally posted by arn
1) Converting MP3 -> MP4 would be stupid.

2) removing the inaudible stuff [b]is the compression. [/B]

There's a lot more to it than that. If it only removed stuff we couldn't hear, then we'd be using it on everything. Bottom line is, mp3 encoding has a significant impact on audio.